often rapidly away again, until
at length, when the sun swept into view above the eastern horizon, we
scarcely had steerage way, and half an hour later it fell a flat calm.
We accordingly lowered the sail, and, this done, I directed Simpson, the
sailmaker--who was the lightest of us, and therefore the least likely to
capsize the boat--to shin up to the masthead and see if he could detect
any sign of the longboat or the barque, and incidentally take a good
look round the entire horizon upon the off-chance of there being a sail
anywhere in sight; but he reported the horizon bare in every direction
except in the eastern board, where he fancied he could occasionally
detect a faint something that might possibly be the sails of the
longboat, although he was by no means sure even as to that, opining that
what he had seen, if indeed he had seen anything at all, might be the
distant fin of a prowling shark.

The mention of sharks gave me an idea, and I asked my companions whether
perchance any of them happened to have any small stuff about them out of
which we might contrive to make a fishing line; whereupon Chips, with a
smile, requested me to vacate my seat in the sternsheets for a moment,
and, opening the locker in the after thwart of the boat, produced an
excellent cod line, with hooks and sinker all complete, explaining that
as soon as he gathered an inkling of what Bainbridge intended on the
previous day, he contrived, while engaged in knocking up a temporary pen
for the sheep, to filch the said line out of the cook's galley and to
secrete it, afterward seizing an opportunity to transfer it to the gig's
locker when he learned that she was about to be turned over to us.
There happened to be a piece of dry shrivelled bait still transfixed
upon one of the hooks; we therefore dropped it over the side, paid out
the line, made fast the inner end to one of the thwarts, and forthwith
forgot all about it in the small bustle of getting breakfast.

But while we were still engaged upon the meal we suddenly became aware
that our fishing line was being violently agitated, and upon hauling it
in found that we had been fortunate enough to hook a young dolphin about
two feet long. Now, raw dolphin is not exactly an appetising dish,
especially to those who, like ourselves, possessed nothing keener than a
really strong, healthy hunger; still, there was the fish, so much to the
good as supplementary to our rather meagre breakfast allowance,